The other shoe...

So we had the students onboard, the machines on the way, I was monitoring the mailing lists - clearly we were on the way...

Well, sort of. The biggest hurdle is in getting the environment (in some form or another) working for all hands. This seems to be much harder than I would have expected. It's not that we can't get emulations to work, it's more that we can't get them to work together.

We started with QEMU emulation on Windows and found that to work - in a way. Without adding the accelerator (which we didn't) they were painfully slow. That lead us to switch to Linux (Ubuntu Feisty), since the machines we use for class can dual boot Windows and Linux. On Linux, we're currently using the sugar-jhbuild environment. This runs much faster, but it's trickier to completely update (at least given my pretty limited knowledge of how it works).

The catch is that we can't get the devices to see each other reliably. They can see each other most of the time or one can see another, but not the other way around, or they can see each other but not communicate, or they can chat but one or the other's messages are duplicated, or...

And to make it weirder, I can log in with my laptop and I can see people outside of school, but not the kids in class, even though we're on the same subnet. I'm still unsure what's going on and what the fix is, although I'm going to be rechecking network settings on all of the machines.

The bottom line is that none of the emulation schemes we've tried have given us functioning, networked virtual XO's at this point. I know, I know... it's probably time to post to the lists.